#plastic words

Plastic words are not new in how they look but in how they are used. They have been fashioned for the purpose of laying down the tracks and outlining the routes of a civilization that is covering the globe with gathering speed. Their origins can no longer be discerned. They resemble one another. It is as though there were a place somewhere in the world where these words were being released at intervals, as though at an unknown place there existed a factory releasing them complete from its assembly line, or as if they were coming into being simultaneously in many different places.

The expert is an authority. In German this is not the same thing as a specialist. A specialist works within his sphere, as a crystallographer, an economist, or an administrator. The word "expert" wanders back and forth between specialized languages and the vernacular. It points backward into technical fields and forward into the workaday world. It twitches and oscillates. Its meaning circles in the way described by Roland Barthes in Mythologies. The point of view alternates between the technical sense of the word and its nimbus. The nimbus predominates. The word "expert" points to the authority of someone familiar with scientific and technical matters. Experts speak with authority.

Plastic Words